Tag: virtual

The Basic Steps to using node on an Azure VM:
1. Open the Port
2. Install Git and Install Updates
3. Install Node and NVM
4. Code and Install Express
5. Run it and check it out!
6. Use forever to keep it alive

1. Open the Port
We’re not talking battleships or submarines we’re talking Infrastructure as a Service.
Visit the landing page for your Ubuntu Virtual Machine:

And select the resource group in the top left corner:

Resource groups are the way we break down how our VM interacts with the internet, other vms, storage, and public/private networks.

To open the port we need to change our network security group which is represented by the shield. (Underlined in the above screenshot)
Then we’ll select settings -> Inbound security rules

This will allow us to open up our VM to the Public Internet so we can visit it like any other website.

Under ‘Inbound security rules’ SSH is already included:

We’re going to add a new Inbound security rule named ExpressServerPort where we’ll set the Destination port range to 3000 which we’ll see later when starting our server. Here’s the configuration pane for our ExpressServerPort:

2. Install Git and Check Updates
Git is fun!

SSH into our Virtual Machine like we did in the VM intro then enter:$ sudo apt-get install git

After entering npm init we’ll be walked through a configuration step for our app. The only one that matters for now is (index.js) which will be the entry point for our app everything else can be the default for now.

If you were actually going to submit/share this code you’d want to accurately fill out this info.

After the initialization step we’ll add express and list it as a dependency:$ npm install express --save

Here’s what those steps look like:

Weeee now have express and an app ready for your code!

Lets open nano and put the helloworld sample into index.js

$ sudo nano index.js

Now lets run our app!$ node index.js

Now that its running lets visit it by entering the IP address and port number into our browser.
In my case the URL is: http://13.88.180.170:3000/

When I search:
Node JS Server Azure, Ubuntu, JavaScript, Mongo, Postgres, Flask, VM
I turn up with all sorts of unhelpful results.
So I dedicated a couple days to creating a couple guides for common Cloud Stacks on Azure VMs to make it as simple as possible to start deploying your code to the cloud.

This is the introduction and at the bottom of this blog post you’ll see other workflows fill in.

First up is Storage:
This will configure what we want to name the storage account for our vm. I’ve changed mine to ‘resourcegrouponestorage’, but I could have selected any of my previous storage account in the same region, in this case westus.

Second is Network:
We can configure a Virtual Network to allow our virtual machines to connect to other resource on our network by default. We can also change this later. So in this case I’m creating the default virtual network.

Again, I could have selected a previously created Virtual Network Called ‘Databases’ which is in the same region.

Third is Extensions:
We won’t add any extensions

Fourth is Monitoring:
Which we’ll disable for simplicity sake, but is a very powerful tool one you start needing to make scaling decisions.

Fifth and finally is Availability:
We won’t use an availability set, until we need to scale out our app.

Here’s what the lower portion of our settings pane looks like:

And we’ll select OK to finish with our settings. This will take us to the summary page so we can do a one more check on our machine, don’t get to anxious about making mistakes because we can always tear this one down and spin up another if we messed something up!

Hit Okay one last time!

You’ll then be taken to your dashboard where you’ll see a nice loading tile:

It’ll take ~5 minutes to spin up and then we’ll be ready to take on the world!

Once ready it’ll look like this:

Click the tile to hit the landing page for our VM:

See that public IP address?
We’ll use that to SSH into our machine.

In my case: 13.88.180.170 !

3. Check VM using SSH

Let’s SSH into our box.

Pull out your preferred SSH client. Here’s bash on Windows and Putty Side by Side:

Notice ‘Timothy’ Triple underlined?
That’s the User Name we set during basic configuration and is paired with the password that we also set in Azure.

When you connect you might have to accept the ras2key fingerprint. It’ll look like this when using putty. Or it’ll be in the terminal using bash. Type ‘yes’ or Select Yes to continue.

As of March 2015 the download you want for a standard windows machine is Windows x86-64 MSI installer (The other download is for servers). Its circled here:

Run the installer!
You’ll come across this page in the installer:

You’ll want to scroll down and add it to the path. If you don’t that’s okay. You can add it later.
Adding Python to the PATH will allow you to call if from the command line.

After the installation is complete double check to make sure you see python in your PATH. You can find your path by opening your control panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables -> Selecting Path -> Edit ->

Now you’re looking at your Path. Be Careful, if you delete or add to the path accidently you may break other programs.

You need to confirm that C:\Python27; and C:\Python27\Scripts; is part of your path.

If you do not see it in your path you can simply add it at the beginning or end of the variable value box. As you can see in the image below.

Install Pip:

As of Python Version 2.7.9 Pip is installed automatically and will be available in your Scripts folder.

If you install a later version of Python I would recommend installing it according to this helpful stackoverflow post.

Pip is a Package manager for python which we will use to load in modules/libraries into our environments.

An example of one of these libraries is VirtualEnv which will help us keep our environments clean from other Libraries. This sounds really confusing but as you start using it you’ll begin to understand how valuable this encapsulation of modules/libraries can be.

To test that Pip is installed open a command prompt (win+r->’cmd’->Enter) and try ‘pip help’

You should see a list of available commands including install, which we’ll use for the next part:

Install virtualenv:

Now that you have pip installed and a command prompt open installing virtualenv to our root Python installation is as easy as typing ‘pip install virtualenv’
Like so:

Now we have virtualenv installed which will make it possible to create individual environments to test our code in. But managing all these environments can become cumbersome. So we’ll pip install another helpful package…

Install virtualenvwrapper-win:

This is the kit and caboodle of this guide.

Just as before we’ll use pip to install virtualenvwrapper-win. ‘pip install virtualenvwrapper-win’
Like so:

Excellent! Now we have everything we need to start building software using python! Now I’ll show you how buttery smooth it is to use these awesome tools!

Lets call it HelloWold. All we do in a command prompt is enter ‘mkvirtualenv HelloWold’
This will create a folder with python.exe, pip, and setuptools all ready to go in its own little environment. It will also activate the Virtual Environment which is indicated with the (HelloWold) on the left side of the prompt.

Anything we install now will be specific to this project. And available to the projects we connect to this environment.

Connect our project with our Environment:

Now we want our code to use this environment to install packages and run/test code.

First lets create a directory with the same name as our virtual environment in our preferred development folder. In this case mine is ‘dev’

Now to bind our virtualenv with our current working directory we simply enter ‘setprojectdir .’
Like so:

Now next time we activate this environment we will automatically move into this directory!
Buttery smooth.

Deactivate:

Let say you’re content with the work you’ve contributed to this project and you want to move onto something else in the command line. Simply type ‘deactivate’ to deactivate your environment.
Like so:

Notice how the parenthesis disappear.
You don’t have to deactivate your environment. Closing your command prompt will deactivate it for you. As long as the parenthesis are not there you will not be affecting your environment. But you will be able to impact your root python installation.

Workon:

Now you’ve got some work to do. Open up the command prompt and type ‘workon HelloWold’ to activate the environment and move into your root project folder.

Like so:

Pretty sweet! Lets get working.

Pip Install:

To use flask we need to install the packages and to do that we can use pip to install it into our HelloWold virtual environment.

Make sure (HelloWold) is to the left of your prompt and enter ‘pip install flask’
Like so:

This will bring in all the tools required to write your first web server!

Flask:

Now that you have flask installed in your virtual environment you can start coding!

Open up your favorite text editor and create a new file called hello.py and save it in your HelloWold directory.

I’ve simply taken the sample code from Flask’s website to create a very basic ‘Hello World!’ server.

I’ve named the file hello.py.

Once the code is in place I can start the server using ‘python hello.py’ this will run the python instance from your virtual environment that has flask.